What I meant:
A) Hasbro will keep prices where they are (hopefully), so that we're not paying $20 for deluxes next year.
B) Hasbro has made direct comments about how difficult the new TF's are to convert. They DO have an interest in simplifying the line.
C) This legion to deluxe move is cost-effective, as it requires little-to-no retooling (just up-scaling).
D) Hasbro is already simplifying their other toy lines (GI JOE & Iron Man), so it's inevitable that even TF sees a dramatic drop in quality -- but hopefully the drop isn't too severe as to completely turn off the majority of kids (who I believe are less observant than you guys).
Of course this is crap for collectors; I am only addressing the ramifications this will have for the children market.
craggy wrote:I remember when the G1 toys started simplifying as new molds were being created in conjunction with Hasbro, rather than just Diaclone toys being repainted. By the time Headmasters rolled around and the gimmicks started, I was still plenty happy and excited by Transformers, but my parents, who bought me the toys, saw the drop in quality and didn't get me many. We got the Classic Heroes reissues here around the same sort of time, so I was still able to get some of them, but the new, cheaper, less posable (and all plastic vs plastic/die-cast/chrome combos) bots were ones my folks discouraged me against. I can imagine that similar things will happen to kids with parents who value their money more.
I don't think making worse toys for more money is a great way to keep the brand ticking along. An all-repaint line, even if they went back a few years for molds, would probably do at least as good. Beyond some of the major characters (and really, isn't every kid who likes TFs going to have at least a couple Bumblebees and Primes by now?) the characters shouldn't matter, since there won't be a show to promote them by the time these come out. If they didn't want to repaint the early BH and/or older Prime stuff then why not just delve into older lines for filler stuff, or go all-out with the Generations stuff? I wouldn't be surprised at the poor value of these supposed Deluxes turning off consumers and leading them to ignore later, probably better designed toys in the future.
I think your parents were FAR MORE INVOLVED than most parents today. Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I don't notice parents pay attention to toy articulation. They pick up a TF and wonder if little Timmy will be able to transform it on his own. Read some of the comments on Amazon - I see a ton of "My grandson was able to build it and he is playing with it over and over!" etc. In other words, I suspect the parents will not notice the drop in quality.
Have parents noticed the Iron Man 3 toys being crap?
They seem to shelf-warm, and maybe it's because the parents see them as cheap crap, as you say?
But I totally agree with your idea of using older Energon/Armada/etc. molds instead of upscaled Legion molds. They did that in 2007 with the movie-verse figures. And in the same vein of this discussion, most kids weren't exactly around for those old molds, so it'd be new to them!
T-Macksimus wrote:If you're from the same age range as me then poseability wasn't an issue because we had 5 points of articulation on our classic Star Wars figures and we were happy as pigs in slop! We didn't know any better. The pinnacle of poseability was the original 12" 1960's G.I. Joe figures and those were a rarity by the time our generation started messing with TF's and while Micro-Man figures were great for flexibility, they were not very common in all areas and they were rather fragile and certainly not suitable for any kid under 10 years of age if you wanted them to last more than 30 seconds.
While I admire your optimism and can certainly see a certain logic behind Hasbro's move, I think they are not properly gauging the reaction of the kids. Their strategy is only going to win over the 7 and under crowd. Any kid older than that is going to say "Screw this!" and lose interest in the first minute. It's still the ADD generation, the generation that HAS to have something "over the top" to hold their attention for more than 5 minutes and doesn't give 2 shits that mom and dad can't afford it. Whatever Habro's reason for making this move, I'm not buying that it's for any desire to get back to basics or that it is strictly a cost issue either and I certainly don't harbor any illusions that they are going to drop their prices back to what they were a few years ago. No, we are going to get less product...again... and get the price raised on us... again!
Very well put!
I agree with all of your points. We certainly didn't have much poseability, and we didn't know better.
I'm not factoring the ADD issue. Now that you mention it, THAT is why so many toys today need to have a FEATURE. Like stupid missile launchers - those come with everything now and I'm always annoyed when they advertise it as something AMAZING!
But the over-the-top attention grabber you speak of is an Ipad. An Xbox. I don't see many kids today swat an eye at the Transformers section of the store; I see plenty in the TMNT section (which incidentally is NOT run by the ad-wizards at Hasbro!
). TMNT toys don't have a lot of gimmicks at all, and kids flock to them. They don't have a ton of articulation either, now that I think of it. So, in essence, it IS possible to interest kids in these things... but Hasbro is clearly doing it wrong.
Posted: Sat Jun 29, 2013 8:04 pm
